How much more zero tolerance can you take?

October 27, 2010|By Rafael Olmeda, Sun Sentinel

The public loves a story about bureaucracy run amok, a story about officials blindly following rules because their hands are otherwise tied, leading them to do enact harsh penalties for reasons that, on the surface, seem silly. We want our officials to exercise common sense in applying the law.

That's why the story of Samuel Burgos resonates with so many. A quick recap: Samuel, then 7, brought a toy gun to school last November. Because the school has a zero tolerance weapons policy, and because the toy gun actually fired harmless little plastic pellets, it was considered a firearm and Samuel (pictured here, with the gun, in a Miami Herald photo) was expelled. Only this week did the Broward School Board lift the expulsion and wipe it from the boy's record. Samuel, now 8, can return to Pembroke Pines Charter School whenever he wants -- just as soon as educators determine how far behind he's slipped after a year away from the classroom.

Common sense would tell you that a principal should know the difference between a toy gun and the real thing (in this case, the principal did: the decision to classify the toy as a Class A weapon was made at a higher level, and it was based on the fact that the gun could actually fire something). Common sense would tell you that this boy made a childish mistake, forgetting to take an item out of his bookbag, an item that was obviously a toy and obviously had not been manipulated to make it more dangerous. Childish mistakes deserve fitting punishments, not life-altering sentences.

The difficulty with arguing against zero tolerance is the alternative: in an educational environment where every administrative decision is second-guessed, could you imagine the backlog of complaints if punishments were left up to the discretion of school administrators? They'd never get any work done. Any time someone faced harsh punishment, the administrator would effectively be put on trial: how does this punishment compare to previous cases handled by the same administrator? By different administrators in the same school? In different schools? In different neighborhoods? Involving administrators of different races or ethnicities? Involving children of different races or ethnicities?

Can you see how it would be tempting to craft a blanket policy that removes the human element from the equation?

That's the real question here, isn't it? We want to guard against bias and uneven application of the rules, the human element, but we want administrators to use common sense, and that's the human element, too. So is the human element in or out?

Thing is, if we demand the interjection of common sense into these proceedings, then we'd better hope common sense really is common. Otherwise we're arguing to replace one outrage, the rigid and inflexible application of rules and regulations, with another outrage, the arbitrary and subjective application of those same rules and regulations.